Seven years of recaps, previews, comprehensive score listings, analysis articles, It Ain’t At All Like Being There™ live text boutcasts, Power Rankings, OUTRAGE!, string-and-tin-can video streams, then with score and clock overlays, then with multi-camera switching. Seven years of incredible people — hundreds of them — pulling together to do incredible things with incredibly inadequate resources, all out of a shared love for this sport and its community.

Seven years is enough. As of today, Derby News Network is retired.

Why?

It has been a terrifically rewarding experience, building a site and a community and a family. It has also taken a terrible toll on the principals who built it and held it together: in stress, in emotional and physical health, in personal finances, in our availability to our families and friends. We’re not here to linger on these costs, but we’ve decided, together, that we will no longer bear them.

Here’s what happens now:

The DNN website will remain up for the near future, but will no longer be updated.

All written content on DNN is already shared under the CC-BY license, which means anyone can reuse it for any purpose, so long as it is credited. Attribution must take the form of “By [author name] for Derby News Network”. Scrape away.

Please remember that photographs on the site *may not* be used for any purpose, because the photographers licensed them to DNN only for use on DNN. We cannot stress enough how important it is that you respect the rights of these creators.

We’ve cancelled out all recurring contributions in Paypal, so ongoing donors will not be debited any further.

We’re giving the full contents of the Derbymatic bout database to the great people at Flat Track Stats, in case there’s any of it that they don’t already have.

Derbylife will live on independently under Em Dash’s continued stewardship.

We’d really like to list every single person and entity who has contributed words, voices, photos, scores, logistics help, sponsorship support, personal funds, reputations, and love to create DNN — but that list would run to over a thousand names, and couldn’t possibly be complete.

You know who you are. We love you like family.

We invite you to join us in memoriam on the DNN facebook page with your memories and photos.

In the final tally, let the recap note that we played our hearts out and left it all on the track.

SACRAMENTO, CA–It took Gotham 33 minutes to break the century mark in their match-up against Denver, but once they hit that mark, there was no stopping them. They held Denver scoreless for seven of the first eight jams in the second period, opening up a 70-point margin with 20 minutes to play en route to a final score of 193-89.

SACRAMENTO, CA–This was indeed a game of two halves and in the opening period, Minnesota looked set to roll right over Rat City, who struggled to break through Minnesota’s stalwart defence. But where Minnesota had doubled up on Rat in the first period, Rat did the same in the latter part of the second–but the run came too late. The margin established in the first three-quarters of the game saw Minnesota escape with a relatively comfortable margin, 197-142, giving them third place in this tournament and punching their ticket to Champs.

SACRAMENTO, CA–Terminal City could well claim the credit for the popularity of the star pass at this tournament, after relying heavily on it during last year’s playoffs season–and it was again much in evidence in their close loss to Tampa in the fifth place game. Smart play got them within a point of Tampa late in the second half and kept them within ten in the game’s closing minutes–but Little A capitalised on an inopportunely-timed last-second track cut by Maiden Sane to bring Tampa home strong and secure them fifth place with a 181-156 win.

SACRAMENTO, CA – In the match-up for 7th and 8th place, #6 seed Santa Cruz (WFTDA #25) came up against #8 Kansas City (WFTDA #33). Kansas City had come off a big loss to #5 seed Terminal City the previous day, just as Santa Cruz had come away from a big loss to Tampa. With Kansas City looking to better their seeding and Santa Cruz looking to not slip any further than one placing, both teams were out for a win in their final game of the weekend.